Joe Lawson: Uncovering history in remote China
Joe Lawson, an Asia:NZ Young Leader since 2008, is currently undertaking a PhD in Chinese History at Victoria University. His research focuses on Chinese society in the mountainous regions of west and south Sichuan in the first half of the twentieth century. Joe is looking at the way in which local and regional governments envisaged settlements using land and resources at this time, as well as how migrants interacted with indigenous people and the economic nature of those settlements.
Joe first became interested in China while undertaking an undergraduate honours degree in history at the University of Otago. He attributes the development of this interest to the realisation that Europe was only a small part of the world and its history until the nineteenth century. It is also a consequence of the high exposure that China and Japan gain in New Zealand media and education in comparison to other Asian countries.
Joe lived in China for three and a half years after finishing his honours course. There he taught English in Urumqi and in two small towns in Sichuan and Jiangsu. Joe learnt Chinese mostly without going to classes but before returning to New Zealand he spent several months in another town in Sichuan working on his language skills. This town ended up as one of the focal points of his present doctoral research.
Joe notes that one of the best things about being an English teacher living in China was the chance to live in some of the poorer and lesser-known areas. “There's nothing wrong with going to Shanghai, Beijing or Guangzhou, but the small towns in the interior are every bit as dynamic and interesting in their own way,” he commented.
In the future Joe would like to work as a researcher utilising his skills in Chinese and also Tibetan, which he is currently learning. He believes that some of the key issues New Zealand needs to address with regard to relations with Asia include increasing the number of Asian specialists in New Zealand universities and gaining more diverse coverage of Asia in our education and media.
